


Quiet as a Shadow

by impudent_strumpet



Series: In The Shadows [3]
Category: Plague Tale: Innocence (Video Game)
Genre: A blanket really, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bathing/Washing, Bathtubs, Bittersweet, Bittersweet Ending, Brother-Sister Relationships, Canon Bisexual Character, Canon Era, Canon Lesbian Character, Caught, Confessions, Crying, Cuddling & Snuggling, Depression, Emotional, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Forehead Kisses, Hurt/Comfort, I Ship It, Late Night Conversations, Late at Night, Literal Sleeping Together, Love Confessions, Melicia, Melie being a perv, Mid-Canon, One Shot, Other, Peeping, Random & Short, Sad, Sad and Sweet, Sad with a Happy Ending, Sharing a Bed, Short & Sweet, Short One Shot, Sisters, Sleeping Together, Sort Of, Spying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 00:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19779343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impudent_strumpet/pseuds/impudent_strumpet
Summary: Mirror fic to "Monsters," with bittersweetness and sleeping fluff.





	Quiet as a Shadow

**Author's Note:**

> I think we're all curious about what happens with Amicia and the others after her guilt-trip hallucination in Chapter 13, but then the game is just like HEY ONE-MONTH TIME SKIP :D LIKE ಠ_ಠ Also a mirror fic to "Monsters."
> 
> Really cruel how the brother/sister pairs of A Plague Tale: Innocence mirror each other... The same day that Mélie comes back with Arthur from the Bastion, Hugo runs away. Then, when he comes back, Arthur is stabbed to death. Amicia loses her brother seemingly forever on the same day that Mélie gets hers back...then Mélie loses her brother well and truly forever on the night that Amicia gets hers back. :(
> 
> What really inspired this fic, though, was when my sister was on her second playthrough of the game, she noticed at Château d'Ombrage they had their clothes hanging outside to dry...leading me immediately to the headcanon that Mélie totally peeped on Amicia changing clothes XD

Things had seemed so much duller and sadder to Amicia at Château d'Ombrage after Hugo had run away. This oppressive melancholy hovered over her each day like a dark cloud, and the guilt she felt within pierced her deep. But she knew she had to be strong. She tried each day, especially when she would set out to search for her brother.  
  
But still she felt so alone, and like it was all her fault. Despite her best efforts, this had happened. She thought, there must have been something more or something else she should have done...  
  
These musings were interrupted when she had the chance, finally, to bathe and wash her clothes. Lucas had offered her this, and at first she had declined, but the trainee alchemist was somewhat insistent, saying that perhaps it would make her feel a little better. And, she knew, her clothes _had_ gotten filthy. So she agreed to it.   
  
She was grateful to finally be able to settle down here at the château, and relief swept over her when she lowered herself into the warm bathwater. There was not enough to wash her hair, and parts of her clothes had become faded and torn, but she was cleaner now than she had been and felt much better.  
  
The boys knew better than to peep while she was bathing, she figured, but she kept an eye out anyways. Her heart jumped when she saw what was unmistakably a human-shaped shadow. But, seemingly as soon as she caught it, it darted away. What was even stranger was that it did not look like any of the boys. Who else could be watching her? There was Mélie, but...why would a girl want to watch her bathe...? Perhaps she was just seeing things again.  
  
The melancholy came creeping back in that night, when it tended to be at its worst. Amicia was all by herself with her guilt and sadness then, like a lone prisoner in a cell...especially with the empty space beside her on the blanket, where Hugo had been. He had always curled up beside her before going to bed. She suspected he could not sleep otherwise here. And it turned out she hardly could either, as tired as she was. This was the clearest marker of her little brother's absence, and it was almost too much for the forsworn sister to take. Many a night it would lead her to cry herself to sleep.  
  
Yet, despite that she did so quietly, someone seemed to have heard her.  
  
That night a familiar-looking shadow approached her as she lay on her blanket and laid down beside her. Amicia hoped this was not another of those frightening visions, or one of those "night-mares" she had heard about, where a strange creature would approach a person in bed, sit on the person's chest so he or she could not move, and induce terrifying dreams. But Amicia could move, she found as she flexed her fingers. As the figure moved closer to her, she caught sight of the red hair, light blue eyes, and more delicate face shape of the female of the twins.  
  
"What are you doing here...?" Amicia asked her.  
  
"Just wanted to sleep with you," Mélie answered, as if she was being scolded. "Arthur and Rodric do it all the time."  
  
That was true, the highborn girl knew, as she herself had seen the two boys resting beside each other, both of them likely grateful for another boy close in age to them. _That was all this must be_ , Amicia thought. She was the only other girl here, so Mélie sought her out.  
  
Then Amicia realized it, upon thinking of the shadow of the thief girl approaching her.  
  
"It was you," she said.  
  
The redheaded girl frowned. "What?"  
  
"You were right there while I was taking a bath, weren't you?"  
  
"...Shit, you caught me. Clearly I need to brush up on my stealth." Mélie grinned, part smugly and part sheepishly. "What can I say? I've never seen a noblewoman like that before."  
  
Amicia slapped the other girl's cheek playfully, both of them laughing. They were both silent for a few moments until Mélie inched closer to Amicia and spoke up again.  
  
"Listen..." she started, her ice blue eyes trained downward at first but then looking into Amicia's brown ones. "I know you've been melancholic. You don't want to show anyone, but we can tell."  
  
Tears started to fill Amicia's eyes. She was about to tell Mélie to please drop the subject, until the redhead slipped an arm around her shoulder.  
  
"Even if...even if he doesn't come back, we're still here for you. All of us. And we'll always be," she said. "I want you to know that."  
  
Amicia buried her face in Mélie's scarf then and wrapped her arms around the thief girl in turn, who pulled her in close and ran her hand up and down the other girl's back comfortingly, not minding at all when she felt tears staining her scarf.  
  
"I'll help you look for him tomorrow, alright?"  
  
Amicia nodded, blinking as more tears rolled down her cheeks. "Thank you, Mélie."  
  
Mélie smiled, brushing the other girl's tears away. "Of course, milady."  
  
Amicia smiled back and laid her head down beside Mélie, finally able to find something resembling comfort since Hugo's departure. Her brown eyes had fluttered closed, and after a few moments, before or after she had fallen asleep Mélie did not know, the thief girl took the chance to tenderly kiss the young noblewoman on the forehead before falling asleep herself.

**Author's Note:**

> At the part where Mélie enters, Amicia is briefly worried that -- because of her depression and guilt over Hugo running away intensifying at night, and the guilt-trip hallucination she had in Chapter 13 -- she is about to have an episode of sleep paralysis. In the past, the entity that a person would see enter their bedroom, sit on their chest, and sometimes try to choke them was called a "night-mare," rather than the word meaning a bad dream like we today use it. People of cultures all around the world in the past thought sleep paralysis to be a ghost or demon sitting on the person's chest and trying to assault or strangle them, before modern science was able to explain it as the brain waking up before the body does and inducing hallucinations. Even today, though, it is unknown exactly what causes sleep paralysis.
> 
> I've also used the word melancholy several times since this was another word for "melancholia," "a mental condition marked by persistent depression and ill-founded fears." This comes from from "melan-," meaning "black" (like in the word "melanin"), + "kholē," meaning "bile," as an excess of black bile had been believed to cause depression. From what I remember of the four humors, the idea was that blood was responsible for cheerfulness, phlegm for apathy, yellow bile for anger (this is where we get the term "pissed off"), and black bile for sadness ("feeling crappy").
> 
> ~ The more you know ~


End file.
